From Arm's Length to Hands-On: The Formative Years of Ontario's Public Service, 1867-1940

Gwynneth C.D. Jones is a policy advisor at the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

J.E. Hodgetts continues his series of indispensable works on Canada’s
bureaucracy with this volume on the early development of the largest
provincial bureaucracy in the post-Confederation period. Like the
others, this book will become the leading source on the structure and
operations of government during this period, providing an underpinning
for studies of policy, legislation, institutions, and governance.

The title refers to Hodgetts’s general theme: the provincial
government’s shift from acting via institutions, such as municipal
governments or voluntary societies, to its direct involvement in
administering services and intervening in a wide range of social and
economic activity. This theme is further developed as Hodgetts
categorizes government departments and policies as operating in the
enabling, operative, or regulatory administrative modes—the last two
modes becoming prevalent as “hands-on” government evolved. Using
this general framework, Hodgetts discusses the many administrative
changes that the Ontario government has undergone since the creation of
the original five departments in 1867. As well, he examines working
conditions and personalities in the early civil service; the effects of
patronage, civil-service reform, and financial-management reform; and
the creation of new administrative entities such as agencies, boards,
and commissions. In a brief epilogue, he describes how some of the major
themes in the book have played themselves out to result in the present
Ontario government structure.

The book is very much an administrative biography. As such, it does not
address in any detail the social changes and reform movements that
pressed government to implement the changes Hodgetts describes, and is
therefore most usefully read in conjunction with the many monographs on
social and political change in Ontario that were produced throughout the
period, particularly those on education reform, public health, and
economic development. However, Hodgetts redresses an important imbalance
by demon-strating the dramatically different meanings of the monolithic
word “government” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by
giving government a history, life, and direction of its own.